I've spent the last 6 years living abroad and I noticed there's a lot of great policies in some countries and then not so great ones in others.
If you could take all the good parts of most countries and try to combine them to create a new country, you could have a winner. This is what happened with the United States hundreds of years ago.
Or you could have an amalgamation of different policies that are dependent on conflicting cultural values.
> Is anyone seriously working on starting a new country?
Hm, I don't know if you consider them serious but there's the ongoing Syrian civil war, Boko Haram insurgency, Mali war, etc...
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-idea...
Let's be real, if there was easier ways to get to mars and if it had resources useful to earth, then we'd already be mining there or such.
It won't be the company that gains sovereignty, so much as the people who colonize
It doesn't seem like SpaceX is claiming Mars, just establishing that Mars isn't governed by an Earth country, which was already established by the Outer Space Treaty.
praise Elon and set blasters to stun!
Giving a private company potential WMD's is a whole other question though.
But you have to build a lot of infrastructure to either get that mass up there, or compel that mass to change momentum.
One drone with a shaped charge could take out a fueled launch vehicle and make the bad unusable for an annoyingly long time. I hope that there are plans to defend against this.
If you haven’t noticed, all territory on the earth is already claimed by a country or agreed to be off-limits by the major powers.
To start a country you would need to engage in war, or get a country to cede it’s territory.
I wonder... Has there ever been an army funded by venture capital?
Defining what "good" means in the context is a vast problem that political philosophy and economics have been trying to understand and state for centuries.
You may be interested in reading about charter cities : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city
United States started with a bloody revolution in order to secede from Britain.
To get some territory for your country, you'd either need a revolution in an existing country or perhaps create an artificial island somewhere in international waters (or a base in space). I don't see any other options.
At this point, it seems only cyberspace might offer some opportunity for political organization beyond the established order, but that itself is doomed , since the physical infrastructure is owned.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_micronations [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland
Every time people try to start a new country from scratch - whether by colonizing some land or a revolution - the results end up completely different to what they hoped or expected, often for the worse. Real lasting change is effected by the long, hard, often unhappy slog. Ask the people who fought for civil rights, or gay rights, or environmentalists - or for that matter, the various conservative groups.
Honestly if you want a new country, start with the one where you live, become an active citizen and do the hard work of showing up and participating. If that's not possible then move to a country where you can make a difference, but still you have to put in the work.
We should be able to try experiments with "re-booting" populations without secession, civil war, ethnic cleansing, or genocide.
I would be interested in re-seeding a secular society that although it doesn't ban religion also doesn't privilege religion. I.e. believe and do what you want but any time your religious beliefs run into conflict with secular values, secular values win. The problem is that religious beliefs are (at least pragmatically) protected because they are so deeply and dearly held. It seems unfair and ultimately futile to just ask true believers to turn it off in school / on the job / in the voting booth.
From what I understand of US law, non-profits are not able to discriminate based on religion, but religious organizations are. So e.g. you can't say "You can't join the Secular Space Nation Project because you're religiously devout or your particular religious beliefs will make you hard to integrate," but you can say "You can't join the Church of the New Space Country" because you don't practice the "New Space Country" religion.
How would that work? You need to have some kind of coherent territory for a state to work I would say. If you do a reboot and someone is not happy with the new values but does not want to move, what do you do?
EDIT> I mentioned anti-discrimination rules because even if you wanted to create a new polity, you can't actually legally deny membership even to people who would be hostile to that polity. Unless you start a religion ... weird.
Alabama is a whole different ballgame than California, and people do (to some extent) tend to self-segregate into states that match their preferred lifestyle and political environment.
Being serious, how are you going to get the land you need? It's not like any country is just going to give you a spare island or two, especially if the island has enough viable resources to be worth occupying. You're going to have to take it from people who already live there, or persuade them that it's worth staying in your ideal society. Ask the Maoris or Palestians how that worked out. You might buy some land, but I'm guessing you're not Bezos, and you're not Musk either, so colonizing Mars is a no-go.
Or...it looks like you want to change US law on the protection of religion. That's a specific change, that actually has a lot of support. The younger generation tends to be less religious than their parents, so there might be a long term trend behind you. Perhaps it might be worth getting on board with whatever groups are lobbying for that change. That's something actionable, rather than dreaming about starting a whole new country.
The US constitution itself is very resistant to change. It's doable, but very difficult in an era of deep polarization and partisanship. For example, many think the electoral college is undemocratic and outdated, but there is a vested interest by both parties in keeping it in place.
That said, the "middle ground" is probably the states. For example, Oregon I believe just decriminalized all forms of recreational drug use. Who knows how that will turn out, but it's a social experiment that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Another example - think of the communes in the 1960s or the Israeli kibbutzim or other experimental communities throughout history. Maybe try out your ideas on a small scale with a small group of people and see what works.
That is, I think that every conviction that a person can have for religious reasons (at least, every one that affects politics or society), people can have the same convictions for non-religious reasons. I see no valid reason for saying that the non-religious ones are "less valid" than secular ones, or that secular ones should win by default.
Now let's say that here's a Catholic university. I'm an atheist, and I want to be the president of that university. They're going to say "no way", and I don't get to claim discrimination, because they're religious.
But let's say there's a Haskell Foundation, and I want to be president of that, even though I'm a hard-core C++ bigot. They are also going to say "no way", but they're going to say "incompatible with our goals as a foundation" or something. But it seems to me to still be quite similar. People who don't believe in the identity of your organization are a bad fit for positions of authority in your organization.
That's in fact why there are religious protections. It's simply unrealistic to expect people to give up their upbringing just to get a certain job.
You identify the problem in your paragraph re: Haskell. Suppose I want to set up some organization working to start a new polity. Let's say that as a baseline, I want to recruit people who think it is wrong to resort to violence over say cartoons that are offensive to their religious beliefs. Or maybe I want to recruit people who have no desire to bar people of different sexual orientations from fully participating in love and social life. I can't do that in the current legal system because religious beliefs are a protected class. I understand why we got here, historically, but now that we're not burning people at the stake, I don't see why their religious beliefs should supersede the larger societal norms (of a new society).
It's a matter of how strongly those beliefs are held and the futility of trying to convince people to abandon such deeply-held and meaningful beliefs. Better to tilt the scales by not inviting them to the party, regardless of which way things evolve later.
EDIT> For any given religion I recognize that there are many possible doctrinal and individual interpretations. But how to measure the individual's preferences as a filter on admission? It's easy to fake answers to a questionnaire. How to establish an org without inviting the griefers, and without running afoul of protected classes? I mean you could do it the old-fashioned nudge-nudge-wink-wink way, but that's a huge legal vulnerability.
But I take issue with:
> Better to tilt the scales by not inviting them to the party, regardless of which way things evolve later.
Just assume, for purposes of argument, that in 100 or 200 years people view abortion the way we now view eugenics - as a horror committed in the name of "progress". And assume that abortion was one of the issues that you "tilted the scales by not inviting" the pro-life people to your new country. Doing so put you behind, rather than ahead (in this thought experiment).
The value of excluding the people who think differently is highly dependent on how sure you are that your direction is in fact correct.
If I argue with you over your non-religious beliefs I may be annoying, but I'm not attacking your whole way of being. If I argue your religious beliefs than there's a lower threshold for me being an asshole, and a lower expectation of being able to sway you.
Rather than religious / non-religious the fundamental distinction is how open to debate and effectively changeable those beliefs are. It's just that, empirically, religious beliefs are harder to sway. They also have greater protection under the law than non-religious beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model
"ABMs do not assume the economy can achieve equilibrium and "representative agents" are replaced by agents with diverse, dynamic, and interdependent behavior including herding. ABMs take a "bottom-up" approach and can generate extremely complex and volatile simulated economies. ABMs can represent unstable systems with crashes and booms that develop out of non-linear (disproportionate) responses to proportionally small changes."
We do see that to some extent in the United States, since the states do have a fair amount of leeway in making a lot of laws. Granted, nothing like what you're talking about.
I can buy an AK-47 with the capacity to accept detachable magazines in Phoenix, but not in Los Angeles.
In Oregon, a minor can get an abortion without a parent present. In Texas, it can't happen without a parent present.
In California I can walk into a store and buy an ounce of Nothern Lights cannabis, but in Alabama, everyone working in the dispensary would be put in prison on felony charges.
In Nevada I can legally visit a prostitute. In Arizona I cannot.
In California I can ride a motorcycle in-between lanes of traffic. In New York I cannot.
All you need now is a large habitable continent without established countries on it.
Even when countries gain independence, they usually clone a large part of their constitution from the colonizing country. The US of A seems to be a rare exception. But also you see things functioning very different in the US - free speech laws, gun laws, and so on, with their pros and cons.
The differences we see today are largely cultural shifts that happened since then.
Edit - I.e. have the citizens of the “guest country” be employees of the guest country.
Some properties:
-It would probably be constrained to the currency of the host country.
-It’s income could be “tax” like a monthly subscription to its “citizens.”
-It would possibly work best if it did have some real assets to back its finances.
-The “warrior class” of the guest country could very well be well-versed lawyers within the host country.
Like a federal state system?
From a more frontier-y first principles approach, I'm not sure you really would be onto a winner. If the USA's own history has taught anyone anything, it's that the cost of settling and forging a new country in this way often comes with distasteful things like ethnic cleaning.
Danny Wallace the British comedian did a whole TV series about this idea
They were popular a while back, but I lost interest when they started becoming officious with silly rules like limiting ages of holders of elected positions. If a majority of people elect an older person or a younger person, then the majority have decided that the person is capable of doing the job, no matter the elected's age.
Although I'm pretty sure both countries agree that it isn't owned by Jeff from Slough.
It annoys me that in 2020 we have people exercising a colonial script where just because there's no piece of paper saying this land is claimed we don't recognize the traditional and de-facto claim of the people who actually are there.
That said ... I'm tempted ...
and
It may be that in our lifetimes we'll see the failure of all or most of the global polities brokering the peace, and then there would be virtually unlimited opportunities for new governance.But I hope not.
Now if you get the USA on your side, you might be able to establish a trading hub somewhere. You'll be getting the protection and also maybe trade deals if you are good enough in foreign diplomacy. This makes you no different than these small islands like Barbados.
The only business, at this point, with no people you can do is either trade, tourism or help tax evasion. You have no infrastructure, no people and building an industry for export is hard with the established players. No one who is established in London (say as a professional surgeon) will move to this deserted island.
Trade will depend on your geographical location. But as you have already guessed, these locations will be highly disputed and sought after by big powers. So you probably won't. Tourism will depend on how nice the place look, but it doesn't create a real economy. Helping foreign companies evade taxes will bring trouble with said countries, so you are going to play international diplomacy while trying to stay behind the US for protection.
tl;dr: Nah.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/05/fugitive-india...